Being a photographer, I have a love-hate relationship with stock photography. If I CAN shoot it, I’d rather do it myself. But looking through some past projects, I ran across this one where we found the perfect stock set for the campaign we were developing.
The client needed to illustrate the frustrations kitchen and restaurant managers feel when forced to write of or take losses on damaged product. Often times, this happens due to over-packing or the manager’s need to order more than necessary to get case rates from their distributors.
Without belaboring the point, the images we found for the direct response campaign hit the mark – almost too perfectly. Not only (after some creative editing) did they succinctly communicate our messages, but they also added a visual hook – one of humor, reliability, and uniqueness – that caught the attention of the client’s target audience. While conversion rates for direct response campaigns often hover below the 5% range, this one provided a 12% response rate and converted to a full sales funnel for the client’s team.
In any market, we’d call that a success!
The bonus to a successful campaign came when budget and return (ROI) both reinforced our smart marketing production and design decisions. Could I have shot the images used on this campaign? Of course. Would it have been as economical from a cost or time standpoint? No. By keeping our photography and production budgets low, the return on our client’s investment showed greater margins than if we’d invested in a day of shooting with hired talent and so-forth.
Stock photography gets a bad wrap some days. With the onset of AI imagery and more, I’m glad to say, 99.95% of the time, SPOKE produces our clients’ marketing campaigns from the ground up. But when facing content, creative, time, or budget issues, we know there are credible resources that can fill in perfectly. This allows us to budget time and energy to more strategic elements of the campaign as well as decrease time on the creative side (did I actually say that?).
Every project comes to us with unique elements that drive where we invest our creative time and energy. From budget to audience size and more, there’s always a creative solution. Going stock is one way to economically meet your creative demands while connecting with your target audiences.
If you have a marketing challenge that could use some creative gusto, SPOKE has more than two decades of delivering on our clients’ marketing needs. Budgets large and small can benefit from a team that knows how to connect using the right communications tools.
Food for thought…
Until next time,
Keep Cooking!
Andrew B. Clark
TheBrandChef
SPOKE Communications, LLC
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